Jolly Thinkers PJOL01 Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Mixed Colours

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Otherwise, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is one of my go-to party games and never fails to disappoint a crowd.

Apart from the forensic scientist, each player is then given four red clue cards and four blue means cards, that they have face up in front of them. You just need to point at a card combination and say the statement 'I think this is how it happened'. If the witness is in the game they open their eyes and the FS will reveal who the murderer and the accomplice are.

Then, players will close their eyes and the murderer will reveal themselves to the forensic scientist and indicate their means of murder and key evidence using the cards in front of them. After this, there is another round of presentations but be warned: the game ends immediately after the final round of presentations. One reason for this is the implementation of double agents: players that start out on the straight and narrow but are revealed halfway through to be secret cylons - just like on the show! But I think it would have worked better with an overall timer rather than mandating a hypothesis carousel. Once all Deception players have looked at their cards, the forensic scientist asks everyone to close their eyes.

The flow of the game is controlled by the forensic scientist who knows the identity of the murderer but can only reveal this to the other players via card play. As investigators these represent I assume whatever things they found at the crime scene and gathered up in the hope that they were relevant to the murder. This allows for the drama of heroics, and sacrifices, where there might be a number of options, and someone throws away their badge just to help narrow it down.From then on, you can only discuss your ideas in the general setting, and can no longer present, or take another guess. The other people problem with Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is it's really light on rule structure and time constraints.

The idea that you have one player that has perfect information but has limited communication is brilliant but the way they communicate is what really opens up the game.Deception really puts the ‘deduction’ into social deduction, with every player devising their own theory, leading up to a dramatic moment where they ‘bet their badge’ on an answer, coming away feeling like a fool or a genius, depending on the result. Being the murderer could easily feel like you’re in a no win situation if the clues and the cards align against you. If nobody is brave enough to solve the case at this point, then the game moves onto the second round.

The accomplice knows everything the murderer knows and wins if they win, and this can be a lot of fun if the two players work well together to support each other’s arguments. When a spy makes a bold play and gets it spectacularly wrong, or a non-spy gives a bizarre answer that no one can make head or tail of, hilarity is sure to ensue.Those giggles will intensify as the investigators get more and more strident with every single trickle of useless information you send their way. But those bizarre stories you start to weave together, just from a few generic words is one of the things that really make this game stand out. It’s not like your choices are great, after all – nothing is so specific that it will nail any given individual and even it was enough to precisely identify a combination of clue and weapon it’s the murderer that decides what the murder was. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is a board game for 4 to 12 players designed by Tobey Ho and published by Grey Fox games in 2015.